The Units of Study offers a planned, sequential, explicit writing program, with instruction that gives students repeated opportunities to practice each kind of writing highlighted by the CCSS (opinion/argument, information, and narrative) and to receive explicit feedback at frequent intervals.
The units of study in this series offer at least one highly developed unit devoted to each type of writing at each grade level. The fourth unit in your grade may be another narrative unit, or another opinion/argument or information unit that builds on the work students did in the previous unit for that type of writing.
What texts will your students be producing across the year?
How might you envision your students transferring skills from one type of writing to the next, and how might you facilitate that transfer?
Within each unit, students are expected to write more than one piece (and sometimes a multitude of pieces) as they cycle through the writing process of planning, drafting, revising, and editing. The fact that students are given repeated opportunities to produce a particular kind of writing is important if we are going to hold students accountable for meeting CCSS expectations: For anyone to become highly skilled at a specific type of writing, multiple practice opportunities are essential. In this series, these opportunities are given not only within a unit of study but also across units of study and grades.
The sessions that support the CCSS-level work your students most need can be used as a model to create new minilessons and small-group strategy sessions, and will help you with your one-to-one conferring. You might take a look at the Common Core correlation charts provided with the series, found at the back of each unit book and on the CD-ROM and our Antietam Curriculum and Technology Website.
Review the Writing Standards Progression we created and work through these questions to be proactive in your instructional approach this year:
How might you transfer the teaching in these sessions to independent writing time or to other parts of the day, during science or social studies, reading or word study?
For more on the Common Core State Standards and this series, see Chapter 2 of the Guide to the Common Core Writing Workshop (pp. 11–19 for the primary grades, and pp. 10–18 for the intermediate grades).
Research Based Units of Study
in Opinion, Information, and Narrative WritingLucy Calkins with Colleagues from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project
The Pathway
The Units of Study offers a planned, sequential, explicit writing program, with instruction that gives students repeated opportunities to practice each kind of writing highlighted by the CCSS (opinion/argument, information, and narrative) and to receive explicit feedback at frequent intervals.
The units of study in this series offer at least one highly developed unit devoted to each type of writing at each grade level. The fourth unit in your grade may be another narrative unit, or another opinion/argument or information unit that builds on the work students did in the previous unit for that type of writing.
Within each unit, students are expected to write more than one piece (and sometimes a multitude of pieces) as they cycle through the writing process of planning, drafting, revising, and editing. The fact that students are given repeated opportunities to produce a particular kind of writing is important if we are going to hold students accountable for meeting CCSS expectations: For anyone to become highly skilled at a specific type of writing, multiple practice opportunities are essential. In this series, these opportunities are given not only within a unit of study but also across units of study and grades.
The sessions that support the CCSS-level work your students most need can be used as a model to create new minilessons and small-group strategy sessions, and will help you with your one-to-one conferring. You might take a look at the Common Core correlation charts provided with the series, found at the back of each unit book and on the CD-ROM and our Antietam Curriculum and Technology Website.
For more on the Common Core State Standards and this series, see Chapter 2 of the Guide to the Common Core Writing Workshop (pp. 11–19 for the primary grades, and pp. 10–18 for the intermediate grades).
Common Core State Standard Correlations to Units of StudyK-5 Correlation for Writing, Reading, Listening and Speaking and Language